June 28, 2019
A member of the Shiraz City Council has been hauled off to prison to serve a one-year sentence for defending Baha’is, his wife has said in a tweet.
Mehdi Hajati was first arrested and detained for 10 days last September for defending the rights of the Baha’i minority. He was then freed on bail.
His wife, Zohreh Rastegari, said in her tweet that on June 1 they received a text message saying her husband had been sentenced to one year. She told the state news agency her husband was picked up at home and transferred to Abdel Abad prison the next day.
His legal trouble started last year when he tweeted, “In the past 10 days, I have knocked on many doors to get two Baha’i friends released from detention, without success. As long as we face foreign enemies, our generation has a duty to reform the judicial and other procedures that endanger social justice.”